


Every Angel is Terrifying

by wanttobeatree



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst, Antichrist!Sam, Canonical Character Death, Dark, Gen, Hell, Moral Ambiguity, Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-24
Updated: 2011-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-15 22:30:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanttobeatree/pseuds/wanttobeatree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post S3 AU. After Dean goes to Hell, Sam would do anything to get him back. What makes a monster: what you are, what you do, or why you do it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Angel is Terrifying

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ.
> 
>  _Who, if I screamed out, would hear me among the hierarchies_  
>  of angels? And if one suddenly did take  
> me to his heart: I would perish from his  
> stronger existence. For beauty is nothing  
> but the onset of terror we're still just able to bear,  
> and we admire it because it calmly disdains  
> to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
> 
> -The Duino Elegies, Rilke  
> (Galway Kinnel and Hannah Liebmann translation)

Anti, prefix.  
Opposite, against; unlike the conventional form.

Christ, from the Greek _Khristos._  
Messiah. Deliverer. Which means saviour, which means rescuer.

That’s all it is, you know. That’s all.

 

Here’s a funny story: Sam is five, or maybe six. He needs a haircut. He’s got holes in his jeans. His favourite superhero is Batman, and what he means by that is his big brother. They’re in Colorado, and the last weeks of summer are drawing out dry and stiflingly hot.

He finds a half-dead kitten by the side of the road. He doesn’t know how to snap its neck, so he hits it with a shoe instead, over and over until it stops crying. Its mouth stays hanging open afterwards, maybe forever, tiny and pink and wet but already going dry.

They leave for Utah as the leaves turn brown.

This is not the punchline.

 

“They were internalising their roles, Sam. Becoming them. It was more than just roleplay.” 

“I’m not saying it was _just_ roleplay, I’m saying that they should have-”

They’re in the student coffee shop, the really cheap one with the baristas who don’t mind if you only buy one cup of coffee and then stay and do your homework for hours. It’s always busy, overflowing with noise, but Jess loves it here. Sam _met_ her here, a few months back, and he’s willing to tolerate its hubbub for that alone.

She’s laughing, shaking her head. “What, you think _you_ would have done it differently?”

“Well, yeah. Wouldn’t _you?_ ”

Jess smacks her hand down onto their table with a bright burst of laughter. Ethical debates always get her excited. Sometimes, Sam likes to ask her what she thinks of Kant and then just sit back and watch the explosions.

“That’s exactly it, though,” she exclaims. “I have no idea what I’d have done. They were all perfectly normal college students, same as us. Exactly the same as us. Maybe they were sat here eating their lunch, thirty whatever years ago. All I’m saying is- I seriously don’t think any of them entered the experiment thinking ‘Abu Ghraib, here I come!’”

Sam shakes his head, tugging the lid off of his disposable cup to stir the frothy cream in. “But then a, what- a third of them? Just threw themselves to that point, in less than a week. There’s internalising the role, and then there’s just plain sadism.”

“Give a dog a bad name and hang him,” Jess shrugs. She’s picking the raisins out of her muffin, face flushed and thoughtful. “Becoming what they thought a prison guard should be, the perpetuated stereotype. Self-fulfilling prophecies. It’s legitimising the ideology, isn’t it. The power of authority.”

“Which is basically the Nuremberg Defence.”

“All right, all right-- it’s not an excuse, just an explanation. Mr Morally Superior,” she adds with a laugh, loud enough that a few heads turn to look at them; Jess knows them, even if Sam doesn’t, and she smiles and waves. “And I suppose you’ve never done something you didn’t necessarily agree with, just ‘cause your- your dad or a teacher told you to, either.”

“I don’t do things I don’t agree with.”

She sticks her tongue out at him. “That’s because you’re a stubborn asshole.”

Sam grins at that, and kicks her under the table, and she doubles over in another delighted burst of laughter. Jess is beautiful. Really, really beautiful. It takes her a moment to compose herself and continue.

“Well, okay,” she says. “What if it were less, you know. Black and white, just a roleplay scenario. Like, what if you were a _real_ prison guard? High security. Rapists and Nazis and- and Satanist psychos. The nastiest stuff you can think of. Would that keep you on your moral high ground?”

“It’s not up to me to-- to take their punishment into my own hands. To judge them, or whatever you want to call it. That’s not _my_ job.”

She cocks her head at him, with the beginnings of a frown. “I thought you weren’t religious?”

“I’m not, really- just.” He shrugs, pulls a face, waves a hand. “How would that work? Oh, that guy killed five little girls, so I’ll make him get on all fours and bark like a dog. This guy only killed one little girl, but he raped her too, so I’ll piss on him. What do I do to the guy who raped five little girls, but left them all alive?”

“Only you would object to the practicalities of prison guard sadism.”

“What can I say? I'm a catch.”

“Yeah.” She leans across the table, smiling and knocking muffin crumbs everywhere, and taps him on the nose. Her fingers linger. “I think you might be.”




 

The dreams begin as soon as Sam can sleep again. Every night since and exactly the same.

They’re silent, for which he had been extremely fucking grateful, at first. But sometimes he thinks it would be better to hear Dean’s screams than to never hear Dean at all.

 

There are ways of telling, if you look:

Nostrils flare and pupils dilate. Breathing speeds up. The body temperature rises by a few small but significant degrees. Under the skin, the immune system has gone into overdrive, producing high numbers of white blood cells. This can be mistaken for leukaemia. What it is, is the body fighting a battle it has already lost against an unknown invader it cannot understand.

All physical signs will cease if the host body expires.

 

The bar is one of those ridiculously trendy varieties, all chrome and coloured lights and the kind of stupid fad that will make it _the_ place to be for a week or two. It will all be dead and forgotten by this time next month, but here and now the place is packed and heaving: after-office businessmen clinging defiantly onto cool as they mingle with hip, young things with multi-coloured hair. There are college students, already drunk on cheap beer before they left their homes- figuring what’s the point in drinking $20 cocktails from Erlenmeyer flasks if you’re not already wasted to enjoy it- so it’s _loud._ This is an advantage.

Sam is in the back, holding a gun to a pretty girl’s head. It is one month since Dean died.

“Please,” she whispers, staring up at him. “Please, I didn’t know, I swear. I thought I was the only one in town. This girl was in a coma, she was so close to dead I could _taste_ it, but I haven’t damaged her. I haven’t touched her family, anyone. I had nothing to do with the others.”

A muscle trembles beneath her right eye as he digs the gun barrel further into her cheekbone, and it sends another tear spilling down her face, gunmetal left salt-damp behind it. She licks her lips. He can hear her breathing. She murmurs, “I saw your brother before I got out. I saw him, I swear,” with her eyes locked on a crack in the grey plastered ceiling.

“You’re a liar,” says Sam.

At contact range, the release of gases as the gun is fired burns the skin around the entrance wound, leaving the edges peeled back like paper in the centre of a stellate laceration. Bone shatters. The colt works its magic in a shower of sparks that jolt through her body. Her eyes remain half-open, drained of black.

Sam wipes his prints from the scene, but leaves her tied to the chair, one last tear still dripping from her chin.

 

“Oh, honey,” she says. “You can’t just walk into Hell willy-nilly, you know. It’d kill you.”

This is Nevada. It is almost two months since Dean died.

“Then what?” Sam demands.

She sighs, like she’s got better things to do right now than answer some punk hunter kid’s stupid questions. “You’ve got to really mean it.”

As he stares down at her, she yawns in a wide stretch of pink and then scratches at her tightly bound wrists. He lets the gun drop to his side, hanging loosely in his grip. “What does that mean?”

“What do you think, honey?” Her smile reminds him of Meg, ‘though he knows she isn’t. “Now, you gonna kill me or send me down or what? ‘Cause I got places to be, otherwise.”

She has a job, Sam knows, because that’s where he found her, joking with a co-worker as she made trendy cups of coffee until a whispered ‘Christo’ had her drop the hazelnut syrup. The girl she’s in is called Judy Bishops, and her body is shivering a little in the chill of the deserted warehouse, eyes black. There have been no murders or mysterious deaths in the area in five years.

“No,” he says. “No, I. You’re fine,” and she sags back against the chair with an impassive face.

He scratches a sliver of paint away from the devil’s trap with the edge of Ruby’s knife and doesn’t look up as he asks, “Did you ever see my brother?”

“No, honey,” she says, voice soft. “I didn’t.”

 

“I have no idea where they come from, Sam,” says Bobby heavily, two days later on the outskirts of Utah. “That’s not my job.”

“But you’re the expert,” Sam insists. He drives five miles below the speed limit these days, unless it’s a seriously fucking dire emergency, and he always, always pulls over when he needs to make a call. He paces back and forth in the gravel of the hard shoulder, kicking at loose stones with his cell digging into his face.

“The expert at sending them back where they belong, sure. I don’t stop for a little chat about what happens when a mommy demon loves a daddy demon very, very much.”

“But Ruby said--”

“Ruby’s not exactly around to clarify the fine points with anymore, is she?”

It’s beginning to rain. The Impala is purring patiently at Sam’s side, and he lays a hand on her hood as he tucks the cell in closer to his ear. “Okay, okay. What about having to really mean it? What do you make of that?”

Bobby sighs in a spike of static and bad signal. “I don’t know, Sam. Twice as likely she was lying as she was telling the truth. Demon, remember?”

“I know,” Sam says. “I remember.”

 

It is three weeks since Dean died and this is how Sam gets Ruby’s knife:

He’d summoned her in the middle of an empty road, pulled over in a squeal of tyres. Chalk on tarmac. If he’d just waited for her to come to him, he would have lost hold of himself, unravelled completely, long before she ever thought of popping by. He’s sure of it.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he snarls, up so close he’s toeing the line, staring at his own reflection in her cool, black eyes. “Why the-- the _fuck_ didn’t you tell me?”

“Because,” she says calmly, “you didn’t need to know.”

Sam snorts, the build-up of restless energy sending him pacing around and around the circle. His hands are shaking, and she’s watching it all with her head tilted back and the faintest of smiles. “Didn’t need to know? What the fuck did I not need to know about, oh, by the way! --the fact that my brother will become a demon and there’s no way to save him? I have dreams. I can’t-- he’s down there, screaming, and I can _see_ him and that’s _forever_. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

“Hi, Sam, I’m a demon.” She waves a hand, words biting out of her. “I spent over _six hundred years_ down there, so, yeah, I do kinda have an inkling of _what that’s like_.”

He stutters to a halt, mid-step, hands dropping to his sides. “I’d forgotten.”

“Hadn’t you just?”

Sam scrubs a hand over his face, and when he looks up again Ruby’s smile is tight and unamused. She’s standing very still. The road is deserted and the sky is grey and. He doesn’t know what. He takes a step closer. “What-- What’s it like? How did you manage to stay...?”

“Not entirely evil?” He nods, and she shrugs, glancing away. “I don’t know. Maybe I just got out before it was too late. I’d never stopped looking-- That’s all any of us want, Sam. Even the old ones-- the really, really old ones who’ve forgotten anything that isn’t blood and pain. That’s all. We just want to get out.”

“I’m going to get Dean out,” Sam whispers.

He can hear a car in the distance, but it’s not getting any closer.

“That’s the spirit, champ,” Ruby says. She spreads her hands, steps up closer to the edge of the circle. “So, now what?”

The barrel of the Colt slots neatly into the hollow of her collarbone. She smiles.

 

Some nowhere town in Arkansas is being terrorised by a demon with a thirst for blood. Literally, a thirst for blood. By the time Sam’s tracked him down, he’s drained one of his businessman meatsuit's unsuspecting clients, left with blood smeared across his hands and face and dripping garishly down his chin. It takes a sprinkler system full of blessed water to bring the fucker down.

“Your brother’s the talk of the town,” he snarls, all bared teeth and ligaments, once Sam’s dragged him someplace drier and caught him in a sharpie-drawn devil’s trap. “We love hearing stories about how he screams. About how much he cries when they tell him his Sammy is dead. I’ve heard he begs for mercy. It’s delicious.”

Drying blood flakes from around his mouth as he throws his head back and laughs. Sam watches in silence, with his fingers laced behind his head.

“He’ll blame you soon enough.” The demon smiles like a shark. There’s blood on his teeth as well. “They all do, in the end.”

He will not react. He will not- Sam keeps his face straight and his voice even, and he says, “You were human once, you know.”

The demon falters. Sam can see the confusion pass across the businessman’s ruddy face, his eyes flickering black, white, black uncertainly. His mouth falls open for a second before any sound comes out. “There was a girl.”

“Did you love her?”

“I don’t remember,” the demon says.

They stare at each other across the thin black lines of the devil’s trap, until Sam breaks their gaze and recites the exorcism, familiar syllables tripping off of his automatic tongue into the silence. The demon wails, the sound of an animal in pain, as it leaves its body behind.

 

But, really meaning it-- how does _that_ work? Does he close his eyes and make a wish? First star on the left and straight on ‘til midnight? What?

Clap your hands if you want to save your brother from an eternity of fiery torment; I do, I do, I do.

 

The diner’s nice. It’s too modern to really get away with the jukebox and the chrome and the Formica, but it makes up for its attempts to cash in on nostalgia by serving some really good coffee. Sam keeps most of his research to the car these days, so it’s nice to spread it out over a real table again, for old time’s sake. It’s three months since Dean died.

“Refill?”

He nods at the waitress in thanks, nudging his cup towards her. Something in town’s been killing little girls, once a month like clockwork. Authorities are exploring several possible leads. He tears the page neatly out of the newspaper.

“Whatcha doing there?” asks the waitress. She’s young and bored and lingering by the cute guy’s table, smelling of talcum powder and minty chewing-gum. Her nametag says her name is Becky.

“Homework,” Sam says. She makes a noise of sympathetic disgust, and he smiles ruefully up at her. The question, when he asks it, just spills out of him, unplanned. “Hey, Becky, how would you really mean something?”

“What? Like, saying I’m sorry?”

“No, uh... like if you were trying to go somewhere, and they told you you had to really mean it to get in.”

She frowns and slides down into the seat opposite him, wrapping her hands around the coffee pot as if it were a mug. It’s quiet enough this afternoon that she doesn’t have to worry about other customers. The sun is shining in her eyes. “College, or something?”

Sam shrugs internally, and goes with it. It’s as good an excuse as any. “Yeah, college, exactly.”

“And you have to really mean it?” Becky taps her nails against the coffee pot’s glass sides, in time with whatever nostalgic pop tune is playing on the radio. “I dunno. I guess I’d do everything I could to show them how much I mean it. Like, how much I want to go there. What do they want you to do?”

“They didn’t mention any specifics but-- Usually only a certain type of person can get in.”

“Well, then be that kind of person. Easy,” she says with a bright, cherry-lipgloss grin. Sam can’t smile back. He’s saved from it by the bell ringing as the door opens, the entrance of another customer announced, and Becky jumps up out of her seat to go take their order. She smiles at him as she passes by, and Sam stares down at the table-top, the yellowish grain of the plastic, trying not to think too hard. He pushes his newspapers into his bag, ‘though he’s pretty sure he’s never going to finish reading them.

The radio is playing American Pie now. Sam leaves his coffee to grow cold behind him.

 

It’s a human killing the kids, and Sam is too late to stop him killing another.

“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, huh?” he snarls. “Come on, if you’re so damn eager to hurt people, why don’t you try and hurt me? You sick fuck, you sick _fucking--_ ”

The guy is trying to get up again, wiggling uselessly beneath Sam’s weight with blood spluttering from his lips as he tries to speak, so Sam grabs him by the face and smacks his head back against the concrete floor. And again. Again.

The crack is satisfyingly loud, when it comes.

“Do you even know her name?” Sam whispers. The guy’s fingers scrabble weakly where Sam’s knees are pinning them to the floor, then go still.

Sam peels himself away from the body, steps neatly over the dark pool of blood spreading across the floor. He always keeps a pistol in the back of his waistband and he tugs it out now, fingers tight around the ivory grips. He doesn’t know her name either. The guy is still staring blankly up at him, eyes wide and surprised, like he’s seen a ghost, like he never really believed he could be caught.

“Why did you get to live,” Sam asks flatly, levelling the gun between those disbelieving eyes, “when my brother’s in Hell?”

 

I killed a man today, is what Sam would say if Dean were here right now. I killed a man and I’m glad I did it. He deserved it. We’ve killed people before, just for having demons in them, and that's-- I think that--

Dean isn’t here. Sam just drives.

 

It is four months since Dean died, and Sam is in South Dakota, throwing his arms wide as he sucks in an angry breath and growls out, “How would you feel if your _wife_ had turned into a demon?”

Bobby stands calmly, the eye of a storm in the centre of the room. “Then she wouldn’t have _been_ my wife.”

“So you wouldn’t have tried to help her?” Sam snarls, pacing back and forth with the need to move, the need to somehow shake away his uselessness. He kicks at the books still littering the floor, lying where he’d thrown them. “Wouldn’t have tried to get her back?”

“Demons are so far gone they _can’t_ get back. You know that. That’s the whole damn point.”

He laughs, shakes his head. The floorboards creak under every agitated step he takes, and there’s dust hanging in the air from the stack of books he knocked over, and if Bobby stares at him any harder he’ll turn to stone. “Then what about Ruby?”

“She was just one girl, Sam. You know what the rest of them are like,” Bobby grinds out patiently. Carefully.

“But we don’t! We have no idea, because we’ve never bothered to find out what--” He rounds on Bobby, arms spread and voice raised, four months of everything pent-up inside of him and held so tightly together until his skeleton’s rattling with it, and he _can’t_ \-- And Bobby doesn’t even flinch, just staring Sam down like he’s as patient as a goddamn saint. “We just send them right back down to their eternal torment like they’re _animals_. No, worse than animals, because at least when a dog bites we train it not to.”

“And then if it bites too much we _put it down_.” Bobby slams his armful of gathered up books down onto a righted desk, and he crosses the distance to Sam in quick, angry strides, until they’re face to face, almost nose-to-nose, with Bobby craning up to glare at him. “For God’s sake, listen to yourself. They’re _demons_. Have you forgotten what they’ve done to your family, all the people they’ve killed? What they’ve done to _Dean?_ ”

“They were people once. We save people, Bobby, that’s what we do, and there are-- God fucking knows how many souls down there and _Dean is one of them_.”

Bobby shakes his head. There’s something very tired, and very sorrowful, in the backs of his eyes, and he reaches out a hand to Sam’s shoulder. “They’re beyond saving, Sam. Your brother is-- He’s--”

Sam’s got Bobby by the collar before he knows what his hands are doing, dragging him up off of his feet and back against the nearest available wall. “ _No_.” He’s breathing like he’s ran a race, ran for his life, fists clenched so tight in Bobby’s shirt they’re shaking. Bobby’s staring up at him in wide-eyed shock, mouth open but silent. Sam’s never-- Sam _doesn’t_ hurt Bobby.

It’s a strain to unwind his muscles enough that he can let go, but he does, setting Bobby down on his feet and backing up a step.

“Don’t you say that,” he hisses, “Don’t you _dare_ ,” and he turns on his heel.

“Sam,” Bobby calls after him, and then he’s cursing and following and grabbing hold of Sam by the elbow, turning him around. Bobby’s eyes are wide still, darting all over Sam’s face. “What are you _doing?_ ”

Sam shakes the hand away from his arm and takes a deliberate step back, to take in Bobby and the rickety house behind him, the books spilled across the floor inside. There are no answers left here.

“My damn job,” he says, turning away. He understands now. And he means it.

He really, really means it.

 

He doesn’t do exorcisms anymore. It’s six months since Dean died, and after he’s made sure the demon’s not-- After he's made sure, he passes them all on for Ellen to spread around her contacts, once he’s promised on his mother’s grave that he’ll stay the hell away from Jo if he knows what’s good for him. He’s pretty sure Ellen knows he’s not passing all the exorcisms onto her, maybe even deliberately throwing other hunters off the scent of a couple, but talking about it would make their conversations longer than either of them want. He’s heard she’s gotten a new hunter bar set up, but she won’t tell him where it is.

She sets him on the trail of a werewolf pack- an honest to God _pack_ \- terrorising a small town in Iowa. He’s got more important things to worry about than werewolves, but he goes anyway, papering over the cracks with silver bullets because he can’t break it off with Ellen when she’s still of some use to him. It just wouldn’t be productive.

The wolves are easy to take down; Sam may not be faster than their claw-sharpened reflexes, but he’s faster than their slowed-down, clogged-up brains, the howling need for flesh and bite and blood that overrides all rational thought. He’s got electricity crackling under his skin: bullets swerve to meet their targets, a single punch sends one of them flying through a wall, and there’s a deep, pulsing rhythm in the centre of his chest that if he could just grab hold of-- if he could just _push_ \--

In ten minutes, there’s only one of them left, feral in her human form. There’s nothing human left in her at all, in the way she walks, in the blood smeared down her face. She can’t be older than sixteen.

“You had a choice, you know,” he tells her, circling around as she keeps to the shadows, prowling on the edges of where the light spills through the mouldering walls. “You didn’t have to be this way, but you chose it. I’m giving you another choice now.”

“When they dragged your brother away,” she snarls, “he screamed and begged for mercy, and they threw strips of his flesh to us. Your brother is _delicious_.”

When he steps forward, she steps back.

“It doesn’t matter what you are,” he says. “It’s what you _do_. This is what you chose to do. And this is what you deserve for it.”

Step forward. Step back. With her back against the corner, all she can do is growl, lips curled and teeth bared, a dog in a trap.

“Sometimes--” Sam says, reloading his pistol. “Sometimes, a monster is just a monster, no matter _what_ they are.”

 

He goes to see Missouri, but he learns nothing.

“Oh Sam,” she says, like her heart is breaking, “what have you done to yourself?” and she doesn’t let him in.

 

Peter Speltz’s house is easy to break into. The man himself is out seeing the thirteen year old girl he’s been grooming for a couple months now- not the first, but this time is definitely the last- and his expensive alarm system just isn’t as good as he thinks it is. Sam has it all disabled in a few seconds with a flashlight and a steady hand, and then it’s just a matter of picking the locks and he’s inside. The carpets are thick and rich and probably cost twice as much as the Impala did, so he slips his shoes off and carries them instead; no sense in spoiling it all with a few misplaced footprints. He’s wearing surgical gloves as well, and he’ll burn them later, but here and now there’s approximately twenty minutes before Peter comes home, and Sam’s got things to do. He locks the door behind him.

The kitchen is easy to find, even in a house as big as this, courtesy of a busy evening with the building plans a couple nights ago. Sam draws circles onto the wide expanse of floor with holy water; it hisses as it touches the marble tiles. One day soon, he’s sure of it, he’ll be able to do this without drawing anything at all. But until then: holy water, and a pinprick of blood- he’ll clean it up later, leave nothing behind- and a diamond ring, and he rolls his head back and closes his eyes.

She doesn’t want to talk to him.

Black smoke pours into the circle, but she doesn’t want to talk to him, and it moves like syrup; thick, slow and unwilling, Sam’s fists clenched white-knuckle tight with the battle of dragging her out to him.

“Come on,” he croons through gritted teeth. “I’m not going to hurt you. I promise. I just want to talk, then I’ll let you go again if you don’t want to stay.”

It’s like an overlay of images, the shutter snapping twice on one exposure: there’s a black cloud of smoke flitting around the circle like a stop-motion butterfly; there’s the delicate curve of a girl’s jutting spine as she curls in on herself tightly, crouched on the floor with her hair falling into her face. They’re the same thing, somehow. Sam wonders, briefly, what a normal human would see.

“Come on,” he says again. “Look, I got your ring back. You remember this?”

The invisible game of tug-of-war goes still at that, rope slackening, as she- smoke and girl- focuses in on the engagement ring in his out-stretched palm.

“But,” Sam adds, closing his fist around it, “I can’t give it to you. Not until we’ve had that little chat.”

Her voice hisses into his brain like pins and needles, a wordless gasp of _want_.

Sam smiles. “You scratch my back, Ava, and I’ll scratch yours. I need your help. Remember that light-switch you told me about? That incredible learning curve? I need you to show me how. I have to rescue my brother.”

She looks up at him, more girl than smoke now. Her eyes are as wide and as bright as they ever were, fever-lit. She licks her greyish lips and nods. Maybe she can’t talk anymore; maybe she just doesn’t want to.

“Good girl,” Sam murmurs, voice gentle. He can feel the prickle of Peter Speltz’s home-coming under his skin, the guy sleepy and stupid with sex, and he smiles down at Ava as he hears the front door open. She’s forgotten how to smile back, but he understands the shape of her twisting lips. “And I’ve got a body for you to wear too.”

Peter Speltz is whistling. Sam selects a long, curved knife tonight; it was always one of his favourites.

 

The country is in the grips of a nation-wide manhunt. The media is having a field day.

The victims follow no particular pattern, and the killer’s MO mostly involves being quick and tidy and not especially brutal. What the murders lack in brutality, they make up for in sheer numbers, and the only link between cases is the unmarked file found by each body, containing detailed reports of exactly what fucked up, monstrous shit the victim committed when their blood was still in their body. People are calling him a vigilante lawyer, or a maverick cop, taking the law into his own hands and judging the wicked. People are saying they’re getting what they deserve.

Public opinion is divided over the killer, but almost everyone agrees it’s even more exciting than the OJ Simpson trial, and in a small town in Nevada, Judy Bishops is marrying a boy she met in a coffee shop. It is ten months since Dean died.

 

The showdown with Lilith comes, eventually, an inevitability rolling in on the heels of the first storms of summer. Her side watches his side- the support he’s gained by keeping hunters off their tracks, or by letting them go himself, or just by the rattling train of word-of-mouth- like they’re at a goddamn funeral. The sky is grey and bruise-coloured, wind building itself up into a howl that sends the playground’s swing set creakingly wildly, and it is a year to the day since Dean died.

“Hi, Sammy,” Lilith says, kicking her heels. The swing’s chains coil around her wrists in a slow, hypnotic twist, like a snake. “I was wondering when you were gonna come play.”

As he steps forwards, hands in his pockets, the wood chip shivers underfoot. He can feel the ground pulsing beneath them, the energy building up like an electrical charge, leaving the air crackling with every step he takes. He says, “You should have come and gotten me, then.”

She cocks her head, giggling. Her eyes are too sharp, too cold and clinical in her little-girl-face. Singsong, “But, Sammy, I was _waiting_ for you.”

Sam smiles and raises his hand, feeling the energy prickling through his skin. “Sorry, Lilith,” he says. He can see the clouds gathering fortress-thick through the gaps between his fingers, as he lets the open safety-pin fall to the ground. “You kinda waited too long.”

Clenching his fist around his thumb, the pinprick of blood on it, it’s like the world tears neatly down the middle of the page, with a jagged red flash brighter than any lightning and the scent of brimstone on the air. Lilith comes to him in one drawn-out scream, with the girl’s head thrown back as the smoke rushes out of her, body gone rigid. He can almost see the fire dancing.

“I’m better than you now. I’m _stronger_ ,” he grits out, as she wraps herself around him. “All you want is power, but I want to _help_.”

It’s the eye of the storm, and it’s the simplest, easiest thing to just take Ruby’s knife and slash out, white light following the blade’s movement in flickering afterimages that spiral up the tower of smoke, webbing and spreading and crackling and--

The explosion of light burns its way through to the back of Sam’s skull, knocking him off of his feet. When he can open his eyes again-- when he can _see_ again, with tears slipping down his face and even his eyelashes can feel the agony of it, she’s gone.

The rest are still watching, still silent as the grave, as he picks himself up again and slips the knife back out of sight. He looks around at them all; they stare right back.

“Go,” Sam says, at last. “Go away. I’m not your leader. I’m just--”

He shakes his head in helpless silence, but they obey him anyway, slipping away into the shadows as he sinks back down onto the grass, rubbing at his eyes. Thunder rumbles overhead; the swing set shivers with it, and the rain begins to fall.

 

“Honey,” she says, the second he answers his cell. “Honey, I’m in trouble.”

The nickname is a giveaway, but her voice alone would have been enough, the sound of it sending a jolt of recognition running down his spine, heady with the memories of that cold night in the warehouse when he finally began to understand. “Judy?” He steers the Impala to the side of the road, leaves the engine ready and rumbling. “Judy, what is it? What did you do?”

She laughs, a dry and brittle noise that rattles down the phone line. “I married a guy. What was I thinking, right? Four months of wedded bliss and it turns out he’s been fucking someone else the whole damn time. Men. And people say _we’re_ the monsters.”

“But now you’re in trouble?”

“I ripped the bitch apart,” she says, distantly. “Limb from limb. I peeled off her skin and made her eat it. I pulled her skeleton to pieces. I made Teddy watch.”

“Goddammit, Judy,” Sam sighs. He scrubs a hand across his face to the tune of her rueful laughter.

“I know, I know. I guess I kinda overreacted. Drew attention to myself. Now some people are looking for me. Your kind of people.”

“Fuck. Look, okay. I’ve got a friend just outside of Lawrence. Name’s Ava. Head to her, she’s powerful, she can protect you. Jump bodies if you need to. I’m--” He tucks his cell phone in close against his face, swinging the Impala back out into the road one-handed. It’s time to drive fast again. “I’m about an hour away, I’ll keep them off. Don’t fucking kill anyone else,” he adds, before hanging up.

 

Judy’s apartment is a mess of a crime scene, cordoned off with police tape. The cop on guard lets Sam through with a blankly obedient smile, a bloody handprint still red and sticky on the wall behind his head.

“Forget I was even here,” Sam suggests pleasantly, stepping through the cracked-open door into the coppery tang of bloodshed that hangs heavily in the apartment’s air. It’s the scene of a massacre, but it’s not the worst, just blood and gore and broken picture frames. The blood staining the carpet spreads neatly before his feet, drawing back into abstract, ink splotch puddles behind him; there will be no footprints, no tell-tale signs to leave behind. He’s better than that now.

The bedroom door, when he finds it, is a fraction of an inch further open than it should be. He can feel it; his skin is prickling with it. Closing his eyes, he breathes the silence into him, and the whispers creep up out of it.

“--gone. They’re always fucking gone by the time we get there.”

“Not exactly gonna hang around, are they. They’re crazy, not stupid.”

“Would be nice if they did, though. The fuck are we meanta track her now? She could be anywhere. Anyone.”

“I’ll bet she’s gone to Lawrence. Activity’s been spiking there these past few weeks. It’s like the whole damn town’s one giant electrical storm.”

“They’re planning something, if you ask me--”

Sam sighs, drawing back into himself. He’s heard all he needs to. “Hi. Surprise,” he says, nudging the door open. There’s a girl and a boy, and the open window they must have climbed through, and they don’t have a chance to react before he’s pinning them gently in place with a frown.

“Winchester,” the boy spits. He doesn’t look old enough to be out of school, let alone chasing demons. “Should have known. Harvelle warned me about you.”

He’s got a tight grip on his pistol, arm shaking with the effort of trying to lift it. Sam coaxes it away with a crook of a finger, can’t hide the smile as it drifts lazily into his open hand and the two kids stare in horror. The girl flinches, but her eyes are burning and her jaw is tight. Her anger is a physical thing, trembling in the air around her.

Sam uncurls her fingers one by one. “Oh,” he says. “Jo’s still hunting?”

“You’re a traitor,” she hisses as her gun is pulled away.

He catches it, and shakes his head. “No, I’m not.” Consecrated iron rounds coated in silver, gunpowder mixed with salt. Not bad. He empties one magazine into the wall behind them, then the other. “I’m helping people. I’m helping my brother. Now, I’m going to go now, and once I’m in the corridor I’ll let _you_ go too. Then you can climb back out that window, go to school, and forget all about hunting, okay?”

“He’d be ashamed of you,” the boy snarls as Sam turns to leave.

He pauses at the door, one hand resting on the doorframe, blood curling absentmindedly away from his fingers. “He’d be proud of me. I’d do anything for him.”

“You’re barely _human_ , Winchester. You’re nobody’s brother.”

Sam sighs, pushing away from the wall and turning back to face them. He pulls his own pistol out of his waistband and levels it in one smooth movement, hearing the boy’s sharp intake of breath, the girl beginning to say something that sounds like ‘please’, before he squeezes the trigger.

It takes a second for the boy’s body to drop, suspended in the air in a misting spray of blood, and then it slumps down to the ground. The curtains drip with blood behind him.

The girl’s gone pale, when Sam looks at her again. Her mouth is moving, but nothing’s coming out of it.

“Go home,” he tells her. “Go hug your mom and dad.”

 

He’s already halfway down the corridor when he hears her scream, her pounding feet behind him, the whisper of a throwing knife cutting through the air. A click of his fingers is all it takes to end all three.

“Sorry about all this,” he tells the cop afterwards, clapping a hand on his shoulder and then wiping it clean on his jeans.

The cop’s eyes are shivering with tears, blood and sweat a sheen across his face, but at Sam’s touch he stands a little straighter, gaze refocusing. “No problem,” he says, with the blank, wide smile of a mind that has already forgotten.

Her blood parts before Sam like the red sea, all the way to the elevator.

 

That night is the night Sam dreams of his brother with his eyes gone black.

It is fourteen months since Dean died.

 

“What about the other way round?” Jess says, half an hour later. Their coffee’s gone cold; the muffin is a mess of crumbs; all Sam can really think about is the way her hand is covered by his. “What if you were a guard at a prison full of-- the Ghandis of the world. Freedom fighters, la resistance, you know? People who don't deserve to be there.” 

“Nah, I don’t think I’d piss on Ghandi,” he replies with a grin. “Unless he was _really_ asking for it.”

She rolls her eyes, tugging her hand away from his to smack him around the head.“Really big asshole, Sam. I mean, would you be a good little guard and keep them imprisoned. Or would you help get them out?”

“I’d help, I think,” he says. Her fingers are still curling in his hair, and he catches hold of her wrist, drawing it down to him. She ducks her head, smiling, as he brushes his thumb across her knuckles. “I hope.”




 

When Sam makes a doorway through, it is fourteen months and one day since Dean died. It’s a non-event. His eyes aren’t black, and there’s last night’s pasta sauce still staining his shirt, and if they say the road is paved with good intentions then good intentions must look one helluva lot like the gravel he’d been walking on a split-second before.

It’s immediately, obviously elsewhere, all the same. Darker, heavier, something metallic in the air. Silent. This gravel hisses underfoot; he can smell the slow burn of the bottoms of his feet, and the grass that lines the edges is dry and dead and sharp as knives. The road winds down into darkness, everything as grey and faded as an old, old photograph. In the distance, there is a pinprick-point of red, flickering like a star.

It’s a long road to Hell, and it takes a lot to get there, but Sam’s pretty sure he’s done enough now.

 

In the end, they’re waiting at the gates for him. When he looks back the way he came, there’s nothing left to see but darkness.

 

Hell leaves no scars. Not physically, at least. Beneath the blood, Dean’s back is a broad expanse of smooth skin; paler than it once was, dirtier, the kind of unwell that verges on grey, but unmarked. It’s all that Sam can see of his brother, the rest of Dean tucked in together like a child hiding, and he knows that it means nothing, the smoothness of Dean’s skin, as a measurement of suffering.

“Leave us alone,” he tells the crowd still gathered around behind him. A shiver passes through them at the sound of his voice. “For at least-- five hours. I mean it. Anyone bothers us before then, we’re leaving.

“Go,” he adds, into the expectant silence. “Now.”

They scatter- out of sight, if not entirely _gone_ , but just having them where Sam can’t see them is enough for now. He creeps closer to where Dean is curled, face turned into the wall of stone, and he crouches down next to him, laying a hand on the back of his neck. Dean’s skin is cold- colder than a person has any right to _be_ when they’re in Hell- but he stirs at the touch.

“Hey,” Sam whispers. “Hey.”

Dean’s fingers twitch, curl, and he breathes in sharply, turning his head towards the sound of his brother’s voice. Sam slides a hand across his cheek, the other slipping under Dean’s shoulders and rolling him gently- gently- onto his back, then up into sitting. Dean’s head lolls sideways onto his shoulder, and he exhales into the hollow of Sam’s collarbone.

“Hey,” Sam says again. “Dean.”

“Knew you’d come,” Dean breathes. His voice is dry and cracked from disuse, from screaming himself hoarse. It takes him two attempts to raise his hand, movements sluggish and eyes shut, but when he catches hold of Sam’s wrist his grip is iron-tight.

“Yeah. It’s me, it’s me. It’s Sammy. I’m here.” Sam drops his head onto Dean’s, presses his face into Dean’s dirty, gritty, blood-sticky hair, feeling his hands shiver against Dean’s skin as he draws him in close and closer again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m here now.”

He breathes in deep. Dean’s fingers curl into his jacket, holding on.

 

Back at the end of it, at the beginning of his road, with light still fracturing in the air from where he tore his way through- he can’t remember how long ago- the fires of Hell have become just that tiny pinprick of blood a long, long way away.

“What now?” Dean asks. He’s leaning up against Sam, right at the front, wrapped in Sam’s jacket, wrapped in Sam’s arm which is holding him upright. He’s quieter, somehow softer now, like they stripped that hard outer shell away, the exoskeleton. His eyes are still green.

There is a humanity’s worth of tortured souls waiting patiently behind them, but wherever Sam looks all he sees is Dean.

He’s looking at Dean, here, now, as he tears the doorway open again, feeling the edges peel back beneath his fingers like burning skin. “Come and see,” he says, and he steps back to let the sun shine in.


End file.
